When it comes to money, there’s a certain amount of fear that is ingrained in us as we grow up. We are taught early on that we need a good education to get a good job to make a good living to pay for a good home in a good neighborhood and provide a secure future for ourselves and our family. To do this, we need health insurance and life insurance and stocks and bonds and savings accounts and IRAs. When we can’t provide these things – or find that what we’re most passionate about in life just doesn’t provide these things – then that fear grows stronger, even paralyzing at times.

I believe that fear is irrational.

See how cute he is??

All my life I was afraid of spiders. Everyone I knew was afraid of them too, from my friends at school to my own parents. Having arachnophobia just seemed so normal, I never questioned it. Then one day, as I was taking a nap on the back porch, I felt something crawling up my arm. I looked down to see a hairy little wolf spider. I wanted to freak out. I mean, I was supposed to freak out, right? The only thing was, I had fallen asleep with my laptop in my lap and any sudden movement would have sent it sailing. So, I sat for a second, just me and the spider. He stopped. I stared. He was so small and well, kind of cute, and even if he had teeth, it wasn’t likely that he was going to chew me up like a wolverine. In that moment, I realized, there was no logical reason for me to be afraid. I didn’t have to do what everyone else did. And who knows, I might even like spiders (or at least some of them).

The same thing happened for me with money. All my life I subscribed to the same fears as my friends and family. I fought viciously to keep up. I racked up student loans to pay for a degree I’ve never used. I took out a zero-down mortgage because “successful people don’t waste their money on rent”. Never mind that part of it was on a 5-year ARM. I bought stuff. I had debt. But I was living the dream, according to those same friends and family. Until I wasn’t. When the economy collapsed, I lost my home. In the months that followed, I liquidated my savings, sold what I could of my possessions to cover my debts, and still ended up filing bankruptcy. Was it something I wanted to do? Absolutely not. Was it the worst thing that ever happened to me? Not even close.

If you’ve never filed bankruptcy, you may not know this, but the first things that you start to get – almost the minute that you leave the courthouse – are credit card offers. It seems counter-intuitive, but it actually happens. Next come the car loan solicitations. From the minute you are free of debt, someone is trying to put you back in it; because this is the way our society works. You are a financial failure if you don’t get back up on the debt pony.

I don’t consider myself a financial failure. I was just unsuccessful at living the American Dream. Why? Because it was never mine in the first place. When I lost everything I owned, a great thing happened. For the first time in my life, my so-called friends and family stopped telling me what to do (most stopped talking to me altogether, at least for a while) and I was left to figure things out on my own – in my own time, in my own way.

I paid off my last post-bankruptcy debt in 2009, while I was living with friends and driving a beat-up Jeep to a job 45 miles away making $11 an hour. I won’t lie and say that it was easy or that I was happy. Happiness didn’t come until much later. What I was back then was focused, but not on the things you might think. I wasn’t focused on rebuilding my credit score or getting back the lifestyle I was “accustomed” to. I was focused on figuring out what really mattered to me.

Bankruptcy didn’t teach me the value of money. It didn’t make me want to earn back all that I had lost and hold onto it for dear life. It taught me that money doesn’t matter much at all in the end. With or without it, I was still the same person, but without it, the world held so much more potential. I didn’t have to live by “the rules” and be afraid of financial failure anymore. I had already failed, but more importantly, I had survived.

It’s a decade later and I believe I have a pretty good handle on what matters most in my life, but my financial recovery has put me right back in the same position with my friends and family that I was before bankruptcy. I get a lot of unsolicited advice and there are some close family members who still give me grief about not owning a home (though I can successfully argue the merits of renting); not getting an advanced degree (In what? Student loans?); and not having a “meaningful” career (which actually means “lucrative” because I’m pretty sure helping non-profits find funding for programs that keep homeless youth off the streets and hungry seniors fed is pretty meaningful). Though I know better, the constant bombardment of other people’s opinions can wear on me and I start to think, maybe I’m not doing the right things. Maybe I do need to buy a house. Maybe I do need to work harder to save more for retirement. Maybe I’m not measuring up to where I should be by this age.

Then I remember: I’m no longer afraid of spiders.

How have your financial failures (or successes) shaped your life to this point? Do your friends and family offer you well-meaning but unwanted financial advice? If so, how do you handle it?

The first month of our 48 Really Great Dates project is in the books. Though we had a few hiccups, we managed to have a lot of fun, doing some super simple activities in/around our town. We spent a total of $39.56 on five dates. Here are the highlights:

For one of our dates, we attended a health fair, where we had our cholesterol, glucose, and BMI checked. For as much as I love to pick on Angie for her exercise routines, something seems to be working for her. Her numbers were great. My glucose was good but the rest left room for improvement. That, along with back pain that just wouldn’t go away last month, prompted me to take my health a bit more seriously. I don’t want to be old before my time and I don’t want to start a medicine collection.

For the most part, we eat a plant-based diet. On occasion, my mom will cook something with meat and we will eat it. These meals are very rare though. The more common problem is sweets. I don’t actually crave sweets and would never bake a cake on my own but my mom absolutely loves to bake and we end up with at least one cake, pie, or cookie a week. I certainly can’t eat all of these but I also hate not eating some of them. After all, she worked hard to create them and it makes her happy. And if you know anything about me at all, you know that I can’t throw them away without feeling like I’ve just destroyed the planet. It’s a dilemma, for sure!

While I figure out how to redirect my mom’s baking efforts, I’ve decided to work on a few other areas of my diet, cutting out things that may or may not be adversely affecting my cholesterol. The first item to go was cheese. We are not vegan so we’ve always maintained an exception for farm fresh eggs and certain cheeses. What can I say? I love cheese. But, I don’t want my love of cheese to break my heart…literally. So no more cheese. I don’t mention eggs because we aren’t eating them now anyway. We only eat eggs in the summer, and even then, only on occasion. I also cut out plant-based oils for the time being, even though they have some health benefits. Our salads are now being dressed with hummus. Our macaroni is being made with sweet potato “cheese”. It’s different, but good. If my cholesterol goes down, I’ll know what permanent adjustments I need to make in my diet. If not, I will talk to my doctor about other options (and believe me, I don’t want to do that).

In addition to the dietary changes, I started a daily stretching routine to help with my back. When I was 14, I had spinal fusion surgery to correct a 54 degree scoliosis curvature. Over the years, I’ve had problems with my back but nothing like the pain and stiffness I had in January. An x-ray showed moderate arthritis in my lower spine. Needless to say, I was not happy with the diagnosis (or myself) so I added the stretches and made a promise to walk at least 150 minutes a week – either outside or on the treadmill. One of the unused perks of our apartment is a very fancy fitness room – a room that I had previously never entered in the 2 1/2 years that we’ve lived here, until last month. So far, I’ve kept my promise and I’ve lost 5 pounds to boot.

Here’s the stretching routine that I pieced together from various Youtube videos:

When we haven’t been dating or dieting, we’ve been decluttering. I swear, I don’t know how so much stuff comes into our home when we buy next to nothing, except food! Yet, we managed to eliminate more than 50 items over the past few weeks, not including paper. We sold 11 puzzles and a lamp; donated a box containing boots, plastic containers, an unused garlic press, a magazine rack, and more to Goodwill; and gave my niece a stack of notebooks and personal care/toiletry items that we were never going to use. We even found a home for the Christmas tree that Angie rescued from the dumpster and repainted.

How’s your year going so far? Have you made any major lifestyle changes? How are your decluttering efforts coming along?